Amazon Introduces Kindle; Apple Introduces Nothing

Monday brings the formal introduction of the Kindle, Amazon's new e-ink based electronic book reader. CEO Jeff Bezos thinks that there's an untapped market out there just waiting for the right device and the right company to bring ebooks to the masses.

And he's betting that Amazon is that company.

Is he right? Let's take a look.

The ebook market is littered with the corpses of those who were too early to market. The Rocket Pocket ebook reader being just one example. Sony recently introduced its own version of reader that found its way into Borders Bookstores, but sales of the reader and titles have been lackluster at best.

Pros and cons...

Amazon, on the other hand, has managed to get a number of things right that many others have missed. At $399, the Kindle is a bit expensive.

But the real cost of a book reader lies not in the device but in the cost of the books. This was a major failing of Sony's Connect store, which initially sold most electronic titles at the same full retail price of the printed hard-bound edition. A price often criticized as unfair since the publisher didn't need to print or distribute a dead tree, nor did a store need to stock it.

Amazon, on the other hand, will be selling new titles for just $10. Classics can be had for as little as $1.99.

Another major failing of prior ebook systems is that you had to use a PC to browse the store and make your purchases. Once made, they had to be transferred to your device.

Amazon's Kindle is an always on Internet device. Books can be purchased and downloaded directly to it, no computers required. And Amazon says that over 88,000 titles are available, ready, and waiting for consumers to do just that.

Previous devices were panned for battery life and for the fact that people just don't want to read from a screen.

The Kindle gets as many as 30 hours of reading on a charge, and the nature of today's audience has changed.

Many today do everything from a screen. They read news and blogs. They socialize. They email and text and chat. In short, screens are becoming the rule, and not the exception.

More advantages...

And ebooks also hold other advantages. For one, every book can instantly be a large-type edition with fonts resized larger for failing or aging eyes. Each book can also hold several shelves' worth of books: 200 of them onboard, hundreds more on a memory card and a limitless amount in virtual library stacks maintained by Amazon. Potentially a boon for travelers and business people who're always on the road.

Amazon also let's you subscribe to newspapers like the Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. New editions are automatically downloaded into the portable device and are ready to go when they are, a great option for commuters who'd no longer need to manage unwieldy pages on a narrow bus or train seat.

And a few disadvantages...

So what's wrong with it? Well, its looks for one thing. Reminds me in many ways of an Apple //c crossed with a Commodore PET, style-wise.

Another is that it used the same DRM scheme it inherited from its acquisition of MobiPocket a few years back, and not the Digital Book Standard created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF).

No word yet on if you can use a book on more than one reader, if a book can be "loaned" to a friend, or if you can re-download content from Amazon.

Despite these shortcomings, Amazon thinks it's created the iPod for readers.

Whither Apple?

Which brings us around to the second half of this article's title: Where's Apple in all of this?

For years I've begged Apple to venture into the ebook market. To do for traditional publishing what they've done for music and, to a lesser extent, for TV shows and movies.

And what do we have? Nothing. Apple seems locked on the notion that a "portable media device" means something that can play music and movies. They seem to forget that there are other forms of media that are older and yet in many ways more popular than CDs and DVDs and their digitized equivalents.

Their sole concession to books lie in the form of audiobooks currently sold through iTunes and from Audible. But while audiobooks work well in many environments and while you're doing driving or engaged in a workout, it's not reading.

Now Amazon has chosen not just to follow, but to lead.

The biggest question in all of this is whether or not people are willing to pony up for yet another electronic device. To carry a phone and an ipod and a notebook and maybe a digital camera and a Gameboy and now, an ebook reader. And the associated chargers, batteries, cables, and other detritus that always seem to follow them around.

Personally, I'd sacrifice some of the advantages of a Kindle NOT to have yet another device to lug and recharge. I'd love to be able to read a book on my iPhone. Its screen may not be as large, but it's gorgeous, and certainly better than the HP iPaq I used not too many years ago to do the same thing.

And I'm always carrying my iPhone.

But, alas, it appears that I'm not going to be able to make that choice.

Or am I?

Continued in... No Wireless. Less Space Than A Nomad. Lame.

Comments

[John Jacobs]

I think that I might like a separate device, like an iPod Touch, only larger, maybe 5x7. Bigger screen for movies, browsing, and like you mentioned here, reading.

Think of how many in-car DVD players such a thing could replace.

[bobby]

My concerns with this device:

-how much is the monthly FVOD-like fee?

-can it rad txt/pdf/html/rtf? How can I put my own files on the device?

-what is this business about paying for access to blogs? Does the blog owner get a cut of the money, or just Amazon? Which blogs are allowed to be accessed?

-is the net access full, unfettered access? doesn't sound like it, if thye're charging for newspaper and blog access.

-can the books ever be read on any other device?

-why the full(ish) keyboard on a reading device?

-it's almost twice as heavy as any Palm/iPhone/etc type device.

[Michael Long]

The EVDO fee is free for browsing the store and Wikipedia. PDF's and a few other formats can be transfered via the email or some cases using the included USB cable. The keyboard is for searching the store, wiki searches and some other things.

[danieleran]

Nice overview.

"For years I've extolled Apple to venture into the ebook market."

Extoll means praise. Maybe you were thinking of exhort?

I'd like to see Apple make it easy to put documents on the iPhone/Touch, too. It looks like this may come as a feature of the new Notes, connected with Leopard's Mail. You could then browse any documents with specialized formatting and graphics using the resolution independent multi-touch display, whether created from desktop documents, PDFs, Guttenburg books, or perhaps bought online through iTunes (even wirelessly).

[Michael Long]

Daniel, To paraphrase a famous Italian philosopher, "I don't think that word means what I think it means." Shows what happens when I try to get fancy.

As to your other comments, I agree, though there may be a few other solutions ahead. One is obviously the forthcoming iPhone SDK. Perhaps Mobipocket or one of the other ebook vendors will see an opportunity and do a port of their reader.

Another is the downloadable "package" format Apple is rumored to be proposing for web content, which allows HTML, scripts, and images to be bundled up and downloaded to a phone for offline use. A few simple scripts and you could use Safari to read multi-page HTML documents with ease.